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having been left a property in a wet but paradisal valley called, felicitously, Paradise Valley.
    No one had lived in the house for several years. The pipes leaked, there were spiders still in the baths, slugs had signed their signatures on all the windows, believing the place belonged to them, the garden was overgrown with weeds that resembled giant cabbages. It was like a children’s story cottage, threatening and enchanting at the same time, the garden full of secrets. Kevern had been sitting holding hands with Ailinn on broken deckchairs in the long grass, enjoying an unexpectedly warm spring afternoon, the pair of them absent-mindedly plugged into the utility console that supplied the country with soothing music and calming news, when the sight of her crossed brown legs reminded him of an old song by a long-forgotten black entertainer his father had liked listening to with the cottage blinds down. ‘Your feet’s too big.’
    On account of their innate aggressiveness, songs of that sort were no longer played on the console. Not banned – nothing was banned exactly – simply not played. Encouraged to fall into desuetude, like the word desuetude. Popular taste did what edict and proscription could never have done, and just as, when it came to books, the people chose rags-to-riches memoirs, cookbooks and romances, so, when it came to music, they chose ballads.
    Carried away by the day, Kevern began to play at an imaginary piano and in a rudely comic voice serenade Ailinn’s big feet.
    Ailinn didn’t understand.
    ‘It was a popular song by aazz pianist called Fats Waller,’ he told her, automatically putting two fingers to his lips.
    He had to explain whatazz was. Ailinn had never heard any.azz, too, without exactly being proscribed, wasn’t played. Improvisation had fallen out of fashion. There was room for only one ‘if’ in life. People wanted to be sure, when a tune began, exactly where it was going to end. Wit, the same. Its unpredictability unsettled people’s nerves. Andazz was wit expressed musically. Though he reached the age of ten without having heard of Sammy Davisunior, Kevern knew ofazz from his father’s semi-secret collection of old CDs. But at least he didn’t have to tell Ailinn that Fats Waller was black. Given her age, she was unlikely to have remembered a time when popular singers
weren’t
black. Again, no laws or duress. A compliant society meant that every section of it consented with gratitude – the gratitude of the providentially spared – to the principle of group aptitude. People of Afro-Caribbean origin were suited by temperament and physique to entertainment and athletics, and so they sang and sprinted. People originally from the Indian subcontinent, electronically gifted as though by nature, undertook to ensure no family was without a functioning utility phone. What was left of the Polish community plumbed; what was left of the Greek smashed plates. Those from the Gulf States and the Levant whose grandparents hadn’t quickly left the country while WHAT HAPPENED , IF IT HAPPENED was happening – fearing they’d be accused of having stoked the flames, fearing, indeed, that the flames would consume them next – opened labneh and shisha-pipe restaurants, kept their heads down, and grew depressed with idleness. To each according to his gifts.
    Having heard only ballads, Ailinn was hard pressed to understand how the insulting words Kevern had just sung to her could ever have been set to music. Music was the expression of love.
    ‘They’re not really insulting,’ Kevern said. ‘Except maybe to people whose feet are too big. My father never insulted anybody, but he delighted in this song.’
    He was saying too much, but the garden’s neglect gave the illusion of safety. No word could get beyond the soundproofing of the giant cabbage-like leaves.
    Ailinn still didn’t comprehend. ‘Why would your father have loved something like that?’
    He wanted to say it was aoke, but was